BELLING THE CAT



It’s blowing half a pelican as we say around here when the wind is very hard. They don’t anywhere else, it seems. I couldn’t find the expression in any of the dictionaries, so I thought I should mention it, although I’m not too happy with a text referring to itself. People yes, texts no. It rather puts a damper on things, I think. The garden is looking like a mad dance floor right now. The immense white veil of the blossoming old apple tree is being tossed about mercilessly. The whole situation cries out for an apt rebuke. I can stand cold and rainy weather as well as anybody, I like to believe, but hard winds set me on edge somehow. Trying to find the mot juste feels like dragging for a lost lottery ticket in the wrong pond. Weblogs should be written au courant de la plume, it’s part of their charm, I think, but the ignorance of a gaijin as to the full meaning of the words tends to take the courant out of the plume. It’s like marrying in stormy weather. You try to remain cheerful and looking your best while mainly worrying about not loosing your hat or your flowers.

ONE MORE SPOKE IN THE WHEEL

Learning a language mostly by reading it with the aid of dictionaries holds other pitfalls as well, I might add, having already strayed so far from the subject that it’s just one more spoke in the wheel, if that’s the word I’m looking for.

The Indian version of English, a Hindu-inspired dialect that pulsates with energy, invention and humour—not all of it intended, according to David Gardner (Plain Hinglish, The Spectator, August 2, 2003), seems to be echoing P.G. Wodehouse’s cricket terminology and army metaphors in newspapers and books, and even in official letters.

“Having saturated India down to the most humble shelves, [...] it’s a safe bet that Wodehouse is the inspiration for many standard Hinglish-isms, viz. a ‘quantum’ (never a mere amount), ‘sans’ (as in, he went out ‘sans’ his coat), or, my favourite, ‘for the nonce’. An Indian acquaintance once playfully suggested that Wodehouse has a place in the elastic pantheon of Hindu gods. [...] “If I’m in any way ‘belling the cat’ here, as Hinglish practitioners incessantly do, that is because so much in India is—as I’m constantly reminded by my interlocutors—‘humungous’. The country is so vast in its expanse, so limitless in its people, so deep in its history, and so, well, humungous in its problems that even the biggest disasters are seen in perspective.”

Although my own tiny homeland would easily fit into the shirt pocket of India, I should do likewise, I think, and not worry too much about a pelican slipping by occasionally, but, at the same time, maybe go a bit easy on the Wodehouse collection in the library. It wouldn’t have been of much help today anyway. Spots of bad weather are few and far between in the great oeuvre. Quite appropriately, Everyman is in process of reprinting it in its entirety, around eighty-five volumes, in an excellent hardback edition. I don’t agree with the publishers, though, that it’s the best edition ever. The period charm of the early Methuen and Jenkins editions is impossible to match, I think, even by a fine Czech illustrator and the best German printer.